World Population by Latitude/Longitude
10:48 am
Supposedly by Bill Rankin, but I’m not having any luck finding it on his site.
HDMI Cable Makers and Dealers Use Misleading Labels
10:00 am
Today, High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) cables are a fact of life in the world of consumer electronics. But is there any difference between an Amazon Basic HDMI cable for $7 and more expensive ones? HDGURU takes a look at the differences between standard HDMI cables, high speed HDMI cables (which are those capable of supporting 3-D and 1080p signals, and HDMI cables that are labeled 240 MHz or more. Personally, I buy the Amazon HDMI cables, and I have never been disappointed.
120 Hz, 240Hz, 480 Hz HDMI cables? Maybe you have seen them in the consumer electronics stores. There is no such thing. The manufacturers label cables this way to confuse you to overspend with jargon useful in describing television refresh rates (link), but has nothing to do with HDMI cables!
via HDGURU.Com » HDMI Cable Makers and Dealers Use Misleading Labels to Push Needless Expensive Upgrades.
GPU Bench
9:00 am
Anandtech has introduced a new tool over at their site. This time it is called GPU Bench. They have benchmarked many of the graphics cards that are available and placed them into a database. Then they allow you to compare one video card against another. This gives you the ability to decide whether or not to buy one video card or another. For example, is it better to buy two GTX 460s and run them in SLI, or to buy one GTX 480? You can get that question answered now. I think that it is a pretty cool idea, but I cannot begin to imagine how much work went into it.
You all have been asking for three things when it comes to Bench fairly consistently. You want the ability to have all benchmarks sorted the same way (e.g. higher is better), the ability to compare more than two products and you want a GPU version of Bench. Today I’m happy to announce that the first version of GPU Bench is live.
via : GPU Bench @ Anandtech
Zooming Into Galaxy NGC 4696
8:00 am
NGC 4696 is an elliptical galaxy that is approximately 150 million light years away from Earth. This galaxy is located in the constellation of Centaurus. Depending on how you look at it, it either looks like a questions mark, or to me, like a comma.
Curling around itself like a question mark, the unusual looking galaxy NGC 4696 itself begs many questions. Why is it such a strange shape? What are the odd, capillary-like filaments that stretch out of it? And what is the role of a large black hole in explaining its decidedly odd appearance?
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 13/08/2010
7:00 am
While most of us are getting ready to enjoy the weekend, let’s not forget that there are some countries facing devastating floods, as we can see on Ria Novosti‘s map. Also dreadful is the picture of the Gangs In America, made by Term Life Insurance. Focus provides us with an excellent overview on the privacy issues in the internet, and the amount of information we are currently providing to companies like Google or Facebook; Cellphones.org brings some interesting curiosities about cell phones, and the last pick of the week is the explanation on how Credit Card Companies make money, by Credit Score.
Infographics Summary for 2010-08-13
10:30 pm
The Foundry Introduces Two New Tools for Adobe After Effects
3:00 pm
The Foundry has just released two new plugins for Adobe After Effects fans, adding impressive camera tracking and matchmoving directly into the popular compositing tool.
First up is ‘CameraTracker’ which can analyze a source sequence to extract the original camera information and motion, then enabling 3D compositing within the shot. Previously only available in NukeX, now it’s available directly within Adobe After Effects CS5.
The other plugins is Khronos5, the first plugin to be accelerated with the Foundry’s new GPU-accelerated ‘Blink’ technology that runs on either the CPU or a CUDA-compliant GPU for maximum performance. The new Khronos 5 offers realtime retiming and motion blur based on their popular Furnace algorithms.
Both plugins are available today, along with a special offer to get RollingShutter and CameraTracker together for After Effects for only $150. Hit up the Foundry Website for all the details.
The Foundry Introduces Two New Tools for Adobe After Effects | The Foundry.
Data-visualization duo turns down Knight funding over open source
2:00 pm
In a surprising decision, Fernanda Viegas and Martin Watterberg have decided to turn down their recent award in the 2010 Knight News Challenge. The two have made themselves famous with their popular ManyEyes and NameVoyager tools, and again just recently with their Time Flow tool, but when this solution they decided that the copyleft license ( a requirement for all Knight News Challenge winners) wouldn’t work.
Flowing Media’s decision, the company says, doesn’t mean they’re against open-source projects. The team is currently building an open-source tool to help journalists plot data on a timeline. At a Hacks/Hackers event in Cambridge, Viegas and Wattenberg presented their project, Time Flow, to techies and journalists. The journalists in the audience I spoke with appreciated the potential the software has to help reporters find untold stories in data. “In the journalism world, there still aren’t great analytical visualization tools. This is an experiment in that,” Wattenberg explained.
An interesting aside is that if a winner doesn’t want to use CopyLeft license in their product, they can accept the award as an interest-free loan to be paid back. Even that was deemed unsuitable.
So in the meantime, the entire project has been tabled. The developers have plenty of work to do anyway with their new employer (Google), but this whole debacle raises the question of how the Knight News Challenge can create long-term sustainable projects that will transition out of the grant stage and into the independent stage.
via Data-visualization duo turns down Knight funding over open source » Nieman Journalism Lab.
Darwin Dimensions offers Free 3D Models on EvolverPro
1:18 pm
A one-week only promotion is underway at EvolverPro.com where you can build, design, and customize one 3D character to any specs you want, fully rigged and ready to animate, and then download it for free in the format of your choice. A great companion tool for products like 3DVia, Ogre, Torque, and others, they allow you to easily design character models via the web, no downloads of plugins required, and download the results in FBX, MB, or DAE formats complete with specular and normal maps.
“As budgets decrease and deadlines become tighter, 3D professionals are looking for reasonably priced solutions to help generate high-quality, customized 3D characters quickly and effortlessly, which EvolverPro.com is the first to provide,” continued Brian. “Offering this ‘first character free’ promotion to our new and existing customers was an easy choice for us, as we wanted to give artists the chance to experience Evolver first-hand and produce quality results at no cost.”
Simply build your character, and use the checkout code ‘pro817′ to get it for free. Full details after the break.
Football Is Coming to Your TV Screen in 3D
12:00 pm
That’s right folks, NFL Football in high-resolution 3D. That is, if you’re one of the lucky few people who can get Verizon’s FiOS1 to the home, which is a disappointly smal number.
Produced by FiOS1, Verizon’s hyper-local news channel, the 3D game will air on channel 834 in the New York City area, including Long Island and Westchester and Rockland counties; Mercer County, N.J and the northern part of the state; Massachusetts; and Rhode Island. Coverage begins 15 minutes before game time at 6:45 p.m., with Verizon FiOS1 pre-game, half-time and post-game shows – all in 3D.
You’ll need a 3D TV Set and glasses, and suitable high-definitely set-top box for the decoding, but once you’ve got that you’re gold.
VizWorld.com 
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